The third installment of Wanderlust Dance Project features new works by home grown talent at the Marshall Family Performing Arts Center on Saturday.

Dallas — Looking over the lineup for this year’s Wanderlust Dance Project (WDP) you can’t help but notice the number of local choreographers that will be presenting work at the Marshall Family Performing Arts Center at the Greenhill School in Addison this Saturday. Come to find out the local programming was a deliberate move by Wanderlust Founder Addison Holmes to support this year’s title, Wanderlust Dance Project III: Homecoming. “Our first year was New Horizons as our first venture, second was Explorations as we brought in a lot of outside choreographers for our dancers and this year we really wanted to hone in on our DFW roots with Homecoming,” Holmes says. The DFW dance scene is stronger than ever, and as a Dallas native myself I couldn’t be prouder.”

The choreographers include a couple of familiar faces such as Hailey von Schlehenried, Gabriel Speiller, Mark Caserta and Mikey Morado as well as some fresh faces, including Stephanie Troyak, Chad Vaught and Todd Baker.

Von Schlehenried recently participated in the premiere of AKA: Ballet and has also presented work at Dallas DanceFest, renamed Dallas Dances, and Avant Chamber Ballet’s 2017 Women’s Choreography Project. Viewers are used to seeing Speiller on stage with Bruce Wood Dance so, it will be interesting to see how he transitions from one role to the other. Caserta and Morado moved to Dallas in 2015 to head up The Thriving Artist Project and are currently working with Dark Circles Contemporary Dance. Troyak is a Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (BTWHSPVA) graduate currently dancing with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Baker was in the news last year as one of five male dancers from Booker T. to be accepted into The Juilliard School. And then there is Vaught, who is not from Dallas, but is currently dancing with DBDT: Encore!

From talking with a few of the choreographers I can tell you that the performance will be blend of contemporary, modern and classical movements arranged in small and large groups with a couple of pas deux’s mixed in. Themes vary from abstract to more story-based pieces that explore a wide range of emotions and current events.

Gabriel Speiller will be unveiling a new work, Unapologetic, which he describes as athletic, musical and sprinkled with intricate partnering. The piece features 16 professional and pre-professional dancers and was originally created for the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York. Regarding his creative process Speiller says, “As a young choreographers I’m still exploring my choreographic voice by trying different approaches to the creation process, whether that be how I generate movement or how I translate what’s going on in my head to the dancers I’m working with.”

Whereas Speiller’s work focuses on athleticism and musicality, Stephanie Troyak’s piece is more focused on mood and setting. “I’m visualizing a dream-like world, one where we cannot tell if it’s real or if it’s a dream until perhaps later on when a situation brings out different sides of human connection whether it be love, betrayal, hope etc. Maybe a little bit apocalyptic or I imagine the setting a little bit like a flood both in the physical sense and the emotional sense, searching for land or light and consuming the mind and body.” Troyak adds, “I always love to blur the lines between reality and dreams and uncover a deeper layer of the human condition that I always find the most beautiful to find those dark or dirty places within. And within this dream state I hope to also unveil moments of small deaths or small victories or maybe it’s a memory or premonition.”

Another local talent presenting work at Wanderlust this year is Hailey von Schlehenried. She has created a pas de deux, which will beperformed by local dancers Adrian Aquirre and Diana Crowder to an excerpt of Ezio Bosso’s Seasong 1 to 4 and Other Little Stories. She describes the piece as classical, but with a contemporary vibe. “You will definitely see some contemporary lines, but also some classical movements and the partnering, which all fit into this storyline of a love left behind,” she says. When discussing the dancers and her partnering in the piece von Schlehenried says “Adrian and Diana work so lovely together and have such a strong connection when dancing this piece. They took to the choreography and the partnering quickly and I am excited to see the final product.”

And as far as the impact this event is making on the local dance community Speiller says, “WDP is an amazing project to be involved in. Not only does it give professional dancers like myself an opportunity to continue working over the summer, it’s giving the DFW community the opportunity to see new works by local and national choreographers that is being performed by home grown talent.”

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